Abstract
This chapter, by the author of The Force of Law, is a series of individual responses to each of the commentaries contained in The Force of Law Reaffirmed. It engages with the main themes of each of the commentaries, but cannot address all of the points made by each author, and in this sense is incomplete.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
A very closely related idea is that of a cluster concept, as developed in Black (1954, 28) and Searle (1969, 162–174). For application to law, see Tamanaha (2015, 359–361). See also Ehrenburg (2009, 193), positing that law may consist in a “particular combination[] of non-unique elements”. Raz (2005) recognizes and rejects the possibility that law is a cluster concept, but does not offer any reasons for his conclusion.
- 3.
Dworkin (2011, 158–160) uses the term “criterial concept”, but it is not clear whether he means it in the same way that I use it here to describe what Vinx suggests, albeit in different terms.
- 4.
Hart (2012, 99). Vinx refers to my distinction between the gunman and the more structured “protection racket” (Schauer 2015, 159–161), and says that he does not understand how my example of the protection racket assists in explaining how coerciveness differentiates law. I agree that my example does not do this, but that is because doing so was not the purpose of the example. In talking about the gunman (Hart 2012, 7), Hart conflates two different properties of the gunman scenario—its raw coerciveness and the absence of secondary rules. My purpose in changing the gunman to the protection racket was thus to disentangle these two properties by positing a scenario in which raw coerciveness was present but the absence of secondary rules was not. If my example succeeds, it is not because it shows that law is coercive, but because it shows only that a coercive system involving primary and secondary rules is not quite as obviously non-law as is the simple and non-rule-structured case of the lone gunman.
- 5.
Thus Gardner describes Hart as having exposed a “sadly … familiar error”, Green describes a system of norms relying soley on sanctions and incentives as “not a system of law” at all, and MacCormick portrays a coercion-centered account of law as “one of the perennial and persistent fallacies in legal philosophy”.
- 6.
- 7.
See Lebel (1979, 779), suggesting the folly of conducting a symposium on psoriasis and the First Amendment, because “each of the terms refers to a matter of independent interest, but the link between the two [is not] intuitively apparent”.
- 8.
This is the theme of many of the contributions in Baxi et al. (2015).
- 9.
And so too Isabel Trujillo in her Introduction, which I address below.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
They are non-hypothetical in the sense that we can say, “If you are playing chess, then you must not move your castle diagonally”. But there is nothing hypothetical about “You must behave rationally” or “You must not torture small children”, and the question is whether law and legal reasons can be, should be, or is accepted in this latter and stronger sense.
- 13.
And I have also argued (Schauer 1991, 128–134, 2005) that there is reason for the state, from its perspective, to impose and enforce an obligation to obey the law even if there is in fact, from the perspective of the subject, no reason to accept an obligation to obey the law. See also Alexander and Sherwin (2001).
- 14.
On what law claims, see note 1 above.
- 15.
And thus it might be of some exegetical interest that the earliest work of Raz (1970), the most prominent of today’s exclusive positivists, draws heavily on Kelsen.
- 16.
Such as the threat of expulsion. See Hathaway and Shapiro (2011).
- 17.
Trujillo wishes to distinguish coercion from other forms of enforcement, such as naming and shaming, but threatening with naming and shaming fits well within my broad understanding of coercion, and an institution that achieves compliance by threatening expulsion, or reputational harm, is still very different from one that achieves compliance by the purely voluntary actions of its constituents.
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Schauer, F. (2016). Incomplete Responses. In: Bezemek, C., Ladavac, N. (eds) The Force of Law Reaffirmed. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 117. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33987-0_10
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